On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Dan Melomedman wrote:

> I decided to set LOCALBASE in /etc/mk.conf to /usr/local instead of
> /usr/pkg. Any disadvantages to this? Packages compiled manually will not be
> overridden with packages from /usr/pkgsrc on this system.

Hmm? You mean "not overwritten" with binary packages, or what exactly
do you mean?

It should work fine as long as you're consistent, as there are very
few places (possibly none) where /usr/pkg is hard-coded in the source.
If intend to mix the packages you build with packages downloaded from
ftp.netbsd.org, it'll likely cause no end of trouble, though, as the
package system will think that dependencies are satisfied, but the
run-time dependencies encoded in the binaries may not be.

You could, perhaps, also set ${PKG_DBDIR} to somewhere besides the
default for the "/usr/local" packages, and never the twain shall meet,
if you must do that...

...but why? If you think that the binary packages on ftp.netbsd.org
have some kind of quality assurance edge over the ones you build
yourself, you might be disappointed. It's just not possible for anyone
to use and test everything that's up there. I find the best way to
have a stable, reproducible configuration is to do "make package",
after, or rather than, "make install", so if I run into problems after
updating a (formerly) stable package, I can use the (old) binary
package to roll back.

Frederick